How to open a tar.gz file

When you generate a download in CZ ID that includes multiple files, these are compressed and packaged as a tar.gz file. You need to decompress and open these files to view and use them.

To do this on a Mac, you can just double click the file, and it will extract automatically. On Windows, you can use an app such as 7-Zip or WinRar or follow the command line steps below.

1. Go to the Windows search bar and type “Command Prompt.”

2. With Command Prompt open, navigate to the Downloads folder by typing the below command and pressing “Enter”. %userprofile% is how you navigate to the folder, which will be unique to each person. It will look something like this: C:\Users\Rosalind Franklin\Downloads.

                   cd  %userprofile%/Downloads

                  Don’t forget to replace %userprofile% with your directory, which can be found

                  by searching for ‘file explorer’ in the search bar. Click on the downloads folder, and

                  then click the ‘properties’ icon     at the top of the page. There should be a

                  pop-up with ‘location’ defining the %userprofile%.

3. Next, type the following command to download the file:

              tar -xvzf  “download.tar.gz”

             Don’t forget to replace “download.tar.gz” with the name of the file you would like to download!

4. Once the command has run, a list of unzipped files will appear on the command line.

5. Navigate back to your Downloads folder, and a new decompressed folder will be there. You can now access all of the files by double-clicking on the folder.

6. These files can be opened in Excel or Numbers.